History's Revenge

"Dateline Sudetenland: Hostages to History" by Timothy W. Ryback, in Foreign Policy (Winter 1996–97), 2400 N St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037–1153.

It was a day that will long live in the annals of folly. On September 30, 1938, in Munich, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Adolf Hitler by agreeing to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Six months later, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. During the seven years of Nazi occupation that followed, thousands perished in death camps. And then, in 1945—in what until recently has been just an ugly historical footnote to the larger tragedy—Czechs took their revenge. They expelled three million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, slaughtering tens of thousands—men, women, and children. Now this "footnote" has been elevated to the center of a dispute that could impede the Czech Republic’s entry into the European Union (EU).

It was the Czechs themselves who first brought up the issue after the "Velvet Revolution" of 1989, notes Ryback, director of the Salzburg Seminar, a forum for international dialogue based in Salzburg, Austria. Just days after his election as president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel denounced the expulsions as "deeply immoral." But Czech attempts at reconciliation with the displaced Sudeten German population, now located mainly in Bavaria, ended in 1991 after the Czechoslovak prime minister and Franz Neubauer, head of the Munich-based Sudeten German Heritage Union, exchanged bitter words.

However, with "one in every four inhabitants of Bavaria claiming Sudeten German heritage, and with Bavaria representing the power base— and much of the economic muscle—of [Chancellor Helmut] Kohl’s conservative coalition government, Neubauer exercises considerable leverage in Bonn," Ryback says. The Germans removed a clause from the 1992 Czechoslovak-German friendship treaty that would have annulled all Sudeten German property claims in Czechoslovakia, and Germany has blocked compensation payments to 12,000 Czech survivors of Nazi persecution. In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, the Czech Constitutional Court in 1995 not only upheld an old postwar decree depriving the Germans of their property and assets but declared the German people "collectively responsible" for the Nazis’ crimes.

By last spring, it appeared that senior German and Czech officials had smoothed things over. But in May, at the annual Sudeten German rally in Nuremberg, German finance minister Theo Waigel roiled the waters with a broadside attacking the Czechs for the "ethnic cleansing" of 1945 and subtly threatening to block their petition for full membership in the EU unless a public apology was forthcoming.

The best course for both countries, Ryback believes, would be an apology from Prague in exchange for a renunciation by the German government of Sudeten German claims in the Czech Republic. Such a joint declaration would provoke howls of outrage on both sides, but the uproar probably would not have lasting consequences. In the end, he says, the most remarkable feature about the current conflict may be that the German government has been able, in the shadow of the Nazi past, to speak firmly about an injustice done to Germans then, but without trying to equate the vengeance killings with the Nazi atrocities. "The contemporary Germans are indeed not the Germans of 50 years ago."